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How to use Suunto Spartan's heart rate zones

18 ledna 2018

TutorialTuesday

How to use Suunto Spartan's heart rate zones

18 ledna 2018

Using intensity zones for exercising helps guide your fitness development. Each intensity zone stresses your body in different ways, leading to different effects on your physical fitness. Read on to learn more about using heart rate zones with Suunto Spartan watches.

WHAT ARE THE HEART RATE ZONES USED IN SUUNTO SPARTAN WATCHES?

The five different heart rate zones, numbered 1 (lowest) to 5 (highest), are:

Zone 1: Easy

Gets your body ready for exercise and accelerates your recovery. Typically used for warm-up, cool-down and recovery sessions. Also everyday activities like walking, climbing stairs, cycling to work, etc. are usually within this intensity zone.

Zone 2: Moderate

Develops aerobic endurance and increases fat metabolism. Long endurance sessions in zone 2 are used for building a strong aerobic base. Improving basic fitness builds a foundation for more exercise and prepares your body for higher intensity activity. Long duration workouts in this zone consume a lot of energy, especially from your body’s stored fat.

Zone 3: Hard

Enhances aerobic fitness and cardiovascular performance. In this zone, lactic acid begins to form in your system, but your body is still able to completely flush it out. You should train at this intensity a couple of times per week, at most, as it puts your body under a lot of stress.

Zone 4: Very hard

Develops your anaerobic, high intensity performance. Lactate starts to build but the efforts are still sustainable. Interval training in zone 4, just below anaerobic threshold, improves lactate tolerance, decreases lactate accumulation and prepares you for race pace efforts. High-intensity training develops your fitness level quickly and effectively, but done too often or at too high intensity may lead to overtraining.

Zone 5: Maximal

Improves your short, high intensity anaerobic performance. These efforts are very hard and should be short. Lactic acid will build up in your system much faster than it can be removed. Athletes include these maximum-intensity workouts in their training program in a very controlled manner. If you are exercising to improve your fitness and stay healthy, you do not need to train this zone at all.

HOW TO ADJUST THE SETTINGS IN YOUR SPARTAN WATCH?

You can enter your HR zones also manually and customize them for your needs.

Set default HR zones

The default HR Zones are used in all activities, unless you have defined activity specific zones for running and/or cycling. Set your default HR zones from the settings under Training » Intensity zones » Default zones

You can have three different sets of HR zones: cycling specific, running specific and default for all other sports.

Set activity specific HR zones

You can set activity specific heart rate zones for running and cycling. Running HR zones are used in running, trail running and treadmill activities, cycling HR zones in cycling, mountain biking and indoor cycling.

For step by step guidance, see the user guide of your Suunto Spartan watch here

HOW TO USE HEART RATE ZONES DURING TRAINING

Heart rate zones are used in all sport modes that track heart rate. The heart rate zone gauge (around the outer edge of the display, as shown above) is visible on all sport mode displays making it easy to monitor the current intensity of your activity.

A dedicated HR zone display can be viewed in factory (default) sport modes showing cumulative time in different HR zones during the activity.

After the session you can view the duration of your activity in different HR zones in the exercise summary.